An APR of 3,678% on a lender's page looks like a typo.
Most of the time it is not. It is the legal ceiling itself, written in a different language, and the difference between an expensive loan and an illegal one is not visible in the size of that percentage at all. It sits in another number, one almost nobody looks up.
What changed in November 2024
Law 243/2024 was published in the Official Gazette on 13 August 2024 and took effect 90 days later, on 11 November. It sets out, through a formula and for the first time, the maximum a consumer loan may cost in Romania.
Before that, the limit came from market practice and pressure from ANPC. Now it comes from a calculation you can redo yourself.
The law runs two parallel regimes. Nearly every misunderstanding in the market starts here: people apply the wrong regime to the wrong product and conclude that a lawful loan is a scam, or the reverse.
The general regime: the ceiling tied to the NBR rate
Article 5 ties the cost to the National Bank's credit facility rate, known as the Lombard facility. The APR of a consumer loan may not exceed that rate by more than 27 percentage points.
The NBR board kept the Lombard facility at 7.50% at its meeting of 8 July 2026.
The consumer-credit ceiling therefore stands at 34.50% today.
The figure is not fixed. The ceiling moves on its own: if the NBR raises or lowers the rate at its next meeting, the limit follows, with no new law required. Any comparison table treating the ceiling as a constant will be wrong within months.
Mortgage loans for real-estate investment fall under article 4, with a far tighter margin: 8 points above Lombard, meaning 15.50% right now.
The exception that confuses everyone
If the 34.50% ceiling applied to every loan, the small-loan market would vanish overnight.
The reason is arithmetic, not ideological.
A loan of 1,400 lei over three weeks carries fixed costs that do not shrink with the amount: identity checks, a Credit Bureau query, the bank transfer, collection if things go wrong. Funded out of an annual margin of 34.50%, they would leave the lender a few lei.
Nobody lends on those terms. The product would leave the regulated market and reappear elsewhere, with no limit at all.
Article 6 solves this with a separate regime for amounts up to 25,000 lei. Here the limit is no longer expressed as an APR, but as a cost per day.
Up to 5,000 lei: the total cost of lending may not exceed 1% per day.
Between 5,001 and 10,000 lei: it may not exceed 0.8% per day.
Between 10,001 and 25,000 lei: it may not exceed 0.6% per day.
Above 25,000 lei you return to the general rule, the 27 points over Lombard.
Who the ceilings bind
The law speaks of credit granted to a consumer, a natural person. The label on the lender's door is irrelevant.
Bank, non-bank lender, a pawnshop lending at interest: if the product is consumer credit, the ceiling applies. At banks the discussion is academic, since a personal loan sits somewhere between 8% and 11% APR, about a quarter of the limit.
The regime bites where costs were high: small, fast, short-term loans.
It does not cover business-to-business lending, operating leases, or credit cards issued under certain structures, where cost is computed on different mechanics.
One detail people miss often: the ceiling covers the total cost of lending, not the interest alone. The analysis fee, the administration fee, mandatory insurance and any charge conditioned on approval all go into the same pot. A lender cannot push the interest under the threshold and then add a fee that rebuilds the difference.
Why a four-digit APR can be perfectly legal
This is where everyone's intuition breaks.
APR is, by construction, an annualised rate. It takes the cost over the loan's real term and projects it across 365 days, compounding. A cost of 1% per day, carried that way over a full year, gives 3,678.34%.
The number does not say you will pay 37 times the amount borrowed.
It says that if that pace ran unbroken for twelve months, that is where you would land. The law does not let you get there, and I will explain through which mechanism.
The exact equivalents of the three brackets, compounded daily: 1% per day means 3,678.34% APR, 0.8% per day means 1,732.71%, and 0.6% per day means 787.69%.
Hold on to that pairing, because it is useful when comparing.
A lender displaying 3,678.34% on a 2,000 lei loan breaks nothing; it publishes exactly the maximum the law permits. A lender displaying 675% on that same product, when its real cost is 1% per day, is showing you a figure smaller than the truth.
The second case should worry you, not the first. An inflated percentage is visible. A shrunken one passes unnoticed, and that is precisely what makes it dangerous.
The protection that actually matters
Each of the three brackets carries a second condition, and that one does the heavy lifting: the total amount payable by the consumer may not exceed double the total value of the credit.
At 1% per day, compounded, double is reached on day 70.
From that point the cost stops. However long the contract runs, however many penalties pile up, the ceiling holds.
The right question, then, is not how large the APR is. It is how much I hand back in total, in lei, by the final instalment. On small loans the answer has a cap you can check yourself in ten seconds: double what you received.
A huge APR on a 14-day loan and the same APR on a 14-month loan describe two completely different realities. The first may mean a cost of 90 lei. The second is not allowed to exist under this regime.
Three examples with numbers
You borrow 2,800 lei for 30 days from a lender working exactly at the ceiling, 1% per day. The cost over those 30 days is 974 lei, so you repay 3,774 lei. The contract will read APR 3,678.34%, because that is what the calculation method requires, even though you paid nowhere near that.
The same loan, from a lender charging 0.45% per day, costs you 404 lei. You repay 3,204 lei.
The gap between the two lenders is 570 lei for exactly the same service, a fifth of the amount borrowed.
Third: you take 14,200 lei over 60 days, at your bracket's ceiling of 0.6% per day. The cost is 6,131 lei, you stay under double the credit, the contract holds.
What the examples show together: in the first two cases the displayed APR was of the same order of magnitude, yet the real cost differed by 570 lei. Comparing on the percentage, on short loans, will walk you into a wall.
What to do with this when you compare
Three checks, in order of usefulness.
First: look at the total payable in lei, not at the percentage. It is the only figure that compares honestly between a 21-day loan and a 4-month one. The mechanics of the indicator are covered in the guide on what APR is and how it is calculated.
Second: see whether the total exceeds double the amount borrowed. If it does, on a loan under 25,000 lei, the contract falls outside the law and you have grounds for a complaint to ANPC.
Third: check that whoever hands you the money is registered with the NBR. A legal ceiling is worth nothing if the party in front of you is not in the authority's registers.
That check has become the most important part. Many sites that look like lenders are in fact intermediaries selling your application onwards, and the percentages they display belong to no real product. The active non-bank lenders and their terms are listed in the comparison of fast-credit lenders.
How to check it yourself, in two minutes
You do not need a financial calculator. You need three numbers from the contract: the amount received, the total to repay, and the number of days.
Divide the cost by the amount borrowed, then by the number of days. Multiply by 100 and you have the daily cost as a percentage, which compares directly against your bracket: 1%, 0.8% or 0.6%.
On the example above: 974 divided by 2,800 gives 0.348. Divided by 30 days it gives 0.0116, so 1.16% per day. Over the threshold.
The simple calculation ignores compounding, which is why the result lands slightly above the legal figure, which was exactly 1%. The gap between the two methods is small over short terms and does not change the conclusion: if yours comes out visibly over the threshold, you have a real matter to raise with the lender.
The second check is simpler still. Is the total repayable larger than double what you received? On a loan under 25,000 lei, yes means something is wrong, whatever the APR box says.
What actually changed in the market
The law produced two visible effects since November 2024.
The first: very short products, the payday type over seven days, became rarer. Their margin lived on an unlimited daily cost, and the 1% daily ceiling combined with the double limit squeezed the model.
The second, more interesting for anyone comparing: displayed APRs went up at some lenders, not down. Those who used to publish convenient figures were pushed into calculating correctly, because ANPC now checks a formula rather than an impression.
An APR that rises after a law capping costs looks like a paradox. It is not. The real cost did not change; it merely became visible.
What the law does not cover
The ceilings concern the cost of lending, and that is all.
They do not guarantee you will be approved, and they do not limit how insistent a lender may be in collection.
Contracts signed before 11 November 2024 stay untouched. If you hold an older loan costing more than today's ceilings, the law does not rewrite it for you.
The text separately regulates the assignment of receivables, the part where your debt reaches a collector. Your rights with the lender and the collector, including where to turn when something goes wrong, are in the guide on your rights when taking a loan.
There is one more thing the law cannot do: stop you from looking only at the percentage.
Roman Dumitrescu, former retail credit analyst at BCR: “Back in 2019, when I worked in retail, the standard question at the desk was what the interest rate is. Almost nobody asked what they hand back in total. The 2024 law moved the answer exactly there, for small loans. The name of the percentage does not matter. What matters is that you never pay more than double, and you can check that figure on your phone before you sign.”